Play with me!

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Last year when we created the Thrivability Sketch, I zoomed through the project. Why? Because people motivate me.  Being in touch with and inspired by others is a major driving force for me. Thus, coordinating contributions from over 65 collaborators and compiling a book were the most pleasant 16 hour days I have had in my working life.

So when I was encourage to write something of a manifesto for thrivability, I forgot that what drives me and brings the most wisdom out is the connection with others. And thus I tried to be something of a hermit when writing. What a different experience!

When I was in New York city speaking with Amy Sample Ward about the Breakthroughs book and my effort to write and fundraise, she reminded me to connect into the network. So let’s shift direction on this. I invite you to play with me and others who believe a thrivable world can breakthrough now.

Get involved in a chapter that you find compelling or join in for the whole process. yes, of course your name will be included and attribution given, but we know that isn’t why you want to play. You want to play because, like me, you enjoy the process of emergence that happens when playing with others. Come play!

It is almost that easy. However, to get this done and do it right, I need to devote time and attention to not only the writing but the community engagement. So I am asking for a small administrative donation to give me dedicated time to nurture and guide this gathering. $25 to play per chapter. A chapter takes roughly a week. $200 grants you access to play in all the chapters.

Click here to see chapters to play with and brief descriptions of them.

See a sample chapter on thrivable.org.

Chip in your $25 for a chapter and get the schedule on when we are working on it.

Or sponsor the whole effort!

Current Champions:

  • Manar Hussein
  • Herman Wager

 

Integration

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This is a time of convergence and integration. Re-integration actually.

It is like that tip of a fractal pattern where it no longer pushes out and starts to turn a corner and draw back in. We have been specializing and specializing and valorizing the specializing for a long time. Some of this knowledge and new understanding pushes us further away from what is known and what is known in related fields. I saw this image a few months ago and had to laugh. I don’t remember where I saw it, so please forgive the replication from memory. Let’s say for example, that the core body is biology, the specific domain is Cellular Biology, and the graduate paper is on the some process of mitochondria.

knowledgeExpands

And while this is expanding our knowledge ever outward, it doesn’t pull us back into core knowledge to shift our basic understanding of the world. It is knowledge that resides in ever smaller numbers of people, applicable and valuable only to them. It is the 18th Century Literature scholar who becomes so deeply specialized in a particular poet or time period that their sphere of language centers further and further out from our common tongue until they become nearly unintelligible to someone in a different field of study. It is the Theoretical Physicist whose language of quarks and gluons seems like an alien or imaginary world to the Sociologist they sit with at the campus-wide faculty meeting.

And yet there is another way that knowledge expands when two related fields develop something near their intersection. And example here might be Biology –> Cellular Biology –> Process of RNA transcription which uses a lot of Chemistry. (These are elementary examples, because you and I do not share enough deep expertise for us to point to some recent edge being expanded here in enough detail!)

KnowledgeIntegrates

Here we begin to find the overlaps between fields, weaving them together into a larger cohesive picture of the world. And as the gates to the intersection open, it continues to expand out, often until the intersection of the knowledge space becomes a field itself. Neurobiology, computer science, sustainability are a few more recent developments that arose as intersections of one or more domains. However, this doesn’t draw us back toward fields that aren’t peripherally connected. It doesn’t take the revelations from statistical math and begin to apply them to organizational design. It doesn’t take a strand of physics and link it to spiritual traditions. These radical connections between fields of seemingly quite different areas is where some really interesting work emerges that can reshape what many of us see about the world and do within that world. These radical connections shift the intersections at the center of our knowledge and open up new axis of information.

And this…. this is where radical innovation happens. It is where most people think you are crazy until all the sudden it pops and knowledge feeds back into the core of our shared understanding shifting many of us.

InnovateKnowledge

And just for some background on the drivers behind this, some of my view here is coming from conversations about Adam Smith and divisions of Labor and Specialization… That we have reached points in the expansion of knowledge by which they hold value to so few people that they can’t attract more to specialize further into that space. And instead, when we pull back to reintegration of knowledge we expand the value of the development of that information so that it serves a broader audience… And thus knowledge expands and reintegrates like the breathing of a giant collective organism.

 

Freedom and Responsibility

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Before I dive into Freedom and how it relates to responsibility, I have to confess that George Michel’s Freedom! song runs through my head as I type. In it he sings “you got to give for what you take.” and while much of the song might only poorly relate to what I am about to play with, this line certainly does.

I typed into twitter yesterday, “Thinking about the connection of freedom and responsibility. To thrive are they correlated?”

A little background. For a long time, I have been irritated and judgmental (feelings I try to avoid). I have been irritated and judgmental about Ayn Rand and her whole Objectivist thing. A few weeks ago, I was reading about Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand. Yes yes, exactly, I was thinking. We love it when we find things that validate or resonate with what we already believe. However, I can also see that between the right and left – the libertarians and the liberals – are two seemingly polemic forces – one side all bloated with self-interest, cries “Freedom above all else!” and everyone who follows that belief can join that side… And the other side righteously declares, “Equality for all!” and everyone who believes in that gathers around. Both sides hold their chests high and have some sort of moral indignation with the other.

First, let’s acknowledge that Ayn Rand attracted a following because there is a tension between the collective and the individual. And there is something deeply satisfying about believing in individual agency. And America (and Australia too) has a love affair with the cowboy – the lone agent, the entrepreneur, the solitary genius, and the self-made man. And sure, if the collective just looks like someone else’s self-interest being served and not honoring the whole or even the other parts, then sure, pursuing your self-interest instead of theirs makes a good deal of sense.

However, it is also the case that except for the wild ones that have left society completely and live alone on the land (and these unusual creatures do exist even if only for short periods of time)… except for the wild ones, we are all intricately linked. So while Rand might have been right to disavow communism, the Objectivists are wrong to neglect our responsibility to the networks we depend on. Freedom and responsibility are intricately linked.

If I have little or no freedom – you have imprisoned me, let’s say; then we can’t really hold me responsible for much (except my thoughts and perhaps my words). However, if I am unshackled and given freedom, I can’t hope to maintain that freedom without supporting the conditions that allow for it. For me to be free, I have to care for the context I am in and the people I engage with. I am never purely autonomous – especially after globalization entered the picture. And for the agents of equality, let me add – if we encourage equality, it may be in our own self-interest – or our belief therein. It is that sense of “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” As well as the same kind of thinking that prevents lower to middle class people from voting to tax the rich, “that could be me, and I don’t want to be taxed when I get there.” And, when my freedom interferes with other people being free, I am responsible for navigating that tension (as are they and those around us). We call this process “Court” and the decisions are “justice” not just for us but for all in like positions. I am hoping there is a court jester in there to keep things lively and light-hearted.

Okay, okay, I get the overwhelm that ensues when we try to be responsible for our actions. Taken to the extreme this can mean accounting for where everything I use and enjoy has come from, who was impacted by the making of these things, what the making did to the environment, and what impact any of all of this can have on me and my descendants or legacy in the future. Just how responsible am I? And how can I feel free when these responsibilities begin to inhibit my actions?
Well, that is the dance we do. Don’t mistake feeling free for being free. We take responsibility where we can today and hope our choices, made to the best of our knowledge, will enable us to be free in the future. We ask not, “what all am I responsible for?” but instead, “where else can I take more responsibility today than I took yesterday?” And asking that, we take a step and action toward increasing our ability to be free tomorrow. Freedom after all is not just the ability to do whatever we want and damn the consequences, it is the ability to make a choice given the consequences we can perceive.

Freedom and Equality are not opposite ends of some spectrum but qualities acting in dynamic tension together.

Responses to my query on twitter:

greghartle Greg Hartle: @NurtureGirl In my opinion, with any freedom comes great responsibility.
ahesse Arno Hesse: Freedom implies living up to your responsibility. RT @NurtureGirl: Thinking about the connection of freedom and responsibility
elizlk Elizabeth Krueger: @NurtureGirl connected by moral sense so that freedom for me isn’t hurting someone else; w/o morals freedom isn’t shared
What do you think?

Nurturing Change: Metrics Matter

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Summary:

We live in a complex emergent world. When you put energy into nurturing a larger space – one beyond your control and possibly even your influence, be wary of assuming causal connections. Look for probabilities and correlations.

When looking for metrics: use multiple perspectives to help develop measures that go beyond your assumed (and blinders on filters). Think through time. And Be sure to track data that allows you to have quick feedback on blue oceans and black swans.

Article:

In an uncertain world – one where emergence from complex adaptive interacting systems is the way most things operate (to a greater or lesser degree) there are things you can control… a broader range of things you can influence/guide, and an ever larger sphere that you can nurture or care for.

Using network theory, we suppose that the impact you can have through the things you can control is small… it operates in the world of Gaussian curves – what Taleb calls Mediocrastan of sorts. And the things we can nurture can possibly (or are more likely to) result in power law dynamics – what Taleb calls Extrimistan. Thus, the impact you can have through nurture has the potential to be much larger.

However your risk and your “authorship” influence this as well. In the world you nurture, it is much harder to attribute outcomes to your actions… there are probabilities and correlations rather than causal connections. I can trace the causal chain on donating $100 to feed the homeless. Did they get fed? How many? Is that where my dollars went? I can’t say that my advocacy of a ban on texting while driving saved lives. I can say there is a correlation of texting while driving and car accidents. And then I infer that reducing texting while driving may reduce car accidents.

And the risk of planting seeds in the nurture space is larger (you have less control and thus less assurance of having a particular outcome). I convince my neighborhood to have an annual potluck and I lead the committee to make it happen. Does this make my neighborhood safer? Reduce crime? Increase sense of meaning and connection?

Transformative philanthropy operates in this nurture space – having potentially larger impacts over time, but it is harder for any change agent working in planting transformative seeds to give direct impact measurable results to funders.

Similarly, if you work in social media (or advertising for that matter) this dynamic of probabilistic correlation but not causal connection makes it rather tricky to say your campaign led to x, y, and z results (through your specific efforts alone). What is that saying? Something like “We believe 50% of our advertising is effective. We just aren’t sure which half.” or something like that.

We can come up with metrics to see if we are achieving the goals we set for ourselves – from products sold to child mortality. However, it is an illusion to think that we can attribute success in these ways to activities we conduct in the nurture space. We campaigned on twitter. Did that increase sales? How can we be sure? In the short term or long term? Did more children survive? Was it because we built a well, gave soap, covered them with nets, increased access to health clinics? Are we sure it was our intervention that made the difference? Or is it the convergence of interventions that tipped impact?

Creating metrics that show your goals are being achieved is level one. Being sure those metrics help link our activity to the outcome is level 2. Being able to look over longer and longer spans of time is level 3 (our action might have delayed or long term impacts which don’t show up in the short term funding calendars). And level 4 is being able to look outside of our own perspective to create metrics that allow us to notice a blue ocean move or a black swan.

My friend Manar, in our conversation on this, gave the example of Nescafe. They were very rigorous in their metrics on grocery store sales of coffee. What they couldn’t see or expect was Starbucks, with an existing brand, moving their coffee into grocery stores and having intense escalating success. Nescafe was blindsided. If you ran a bookstore, how would you have been using metrics that would have helped you anticipate Amazon.com impacting your business?

*** This post is part of the series for the Breakthroughs book. Please see Contribute to Book for more. ***

Help Others Thrive

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Helping others to thrive sounds lovely and idealistic, right? Turns out to be hugely practical.

If you are developing social software and looking for investors, you can be sure they are going to ask how you are building community. Who has done this well? Those who created a space for others to thrive.

I was recently reading Power of Pull. They tell a wonderful story, and John Hagel tells this story when he speaks too, about the industry shift to container shipping. A guy running a trucking company built from the ground up realized there had to be a better way to ship things. He designed shipping containers, and he patented it. Only he opened the patent to everyone. Then he convinced all the players in the system of the benefits of using these containers to make shipping easier and more efficient. The net result is that he evolved the market, did well financially, and probably made the cheap transportation of goods that led to globalization possible. Industry shifting.

When we look at the well scaled social websites such as facebook and twitter, we see a similar creating of shared space with a small corner of that space being profit for the creator of the space. Facebook’s apps allowed other people to make a profit on top of their application. Twitter enables a whole market of vendors, applications, advisors, “experts” to make a living on top of their platform. Viola… other people come to play. Apple and Android with their apps markets do this as well.

Create a space for a collective. Select a small tangible and profitable corner of it that respects the free flow of the community while allowing you to collect a “tax” for high-end service in the collective.

A lot of open-source software also follows this model. Allow others to play and add and evolve the collective space while charging for a subset of activity in that community. Getting this right is of course harder than it may sound. It doesn’t work at small scales. Communities are highly sensitive about what is owned, controlled and profited from. Revenue may come in the form of voluntary contributions or pay for service forms. And it can be much more difficult to control the flow – you may have to support the community until it reaches significant scale to support you back. Whereas usual fee for service models allow you to restrict service if fees are not sufficient for support, these community spaces don’t have easy on-off switches. You have to trust.

And thus, for success, you see two things. One, that they start with small or focused collectives and then open up to larger and larger communities as investment allows for expansion. And two, with significant promise, they take in large amounts of funding with years of delay expected between investment and payout. They can be slow capital.

How can you create a play space that helps others to thrive? And how, by doing so, can it feed back to help you thrive over time?

*** This post is part of the series for the Breakthroughs book. Please see Contribute to Book for more. ***